Here we are at the end of this little experiment. I hope you enjoyed the story. It was a good long while between the most recent post and the start of this story, but that’s the risk you run reading … Continue reading →

Ending up on the machinery deck saved Varouforos a detour. My original concept for Varouforos was more in keeping with one Admiral Kutuzov’s in-universe reputation in The Mote in God’s Eye (his nickname was the Butcher), but ended up more … Continue reading →

I mentioned back at the start of this story that I wrote it to submit to an anthology, whose strict length limit was why Varouforos’ adventures between the machinery room and the park ended up elided. I suppose I had … Continue reading →

One of my favorite sci-fi tropes is the ancient starship. Given the way I set up the RPJ Sci-Fi canon, most ships end up being centuries old—the galaxy is high-tech by dint of age and accumulation, rather than by dint … Continue reading →

In this story, I have not yet invented any technology which doesn’t exist in the RPJ Sci-Fi rulebook. Varouforos would be a very late-game character if a player character at all, but he’s legal by the rules as written.

I doubt you’ve noticed, but the URL scheme has changed very slightly—it doesn’t match the post title as closely as it used to. This is so that I can simply clone my template posts without having to make and changes … Continue reading →

This post is slightly longer than I wanted, but the Friday cliffhanger was too good to pass up. At this point, by word count the story is somewhat less than half done, so it looks like we’re closer to a … Continue reading →

One way I describe the Empire in the RPJ Sci-Fi rulebook is that it is somewhat xenophobic, but that xeno- has long since ceased to apply to non-Greek humans. Varouforos is chummier with aliens than normal for nominal Imperials. One … Continue reading →

To emphasize Varouforos’ Russian-ness, I use that language’s convention for ship pronouns—namely, that there isn’t a special convention, and ships merely use the grammatically-appropriate pronoun for the ship’s name. Morana is feminine, so gets ‘she’; Perun is masculine, and gets … Continue reading →

Occasionally, there’s a break in the story right about where I want to split across posts here, and that feels great when it happens, as it did here. Varouforos is, as I believe I’ve already said in narration (unless I’m … Continue reading →